To start, I’ll put aside Palestine.
In 2013, among a group of friends in an online forum, contemplating the souring hopes of the late Obama years and wondering what might come after—that is to say, with Trump/Sanders populism still beyond credible prediction—Lucy Sante wrote to us:
On wealth and its distribution, however, which is the issue that matters to me more than all others combined, we are currently in the 33rd year of the Reagan administration. I don’t see a change of administration coming anytime soon.
The remark’s clarity has haunted me.
Reviling Trump is a way of life. I catch myself dreaming his comeuppance like I notice my sexual fantasizing. I’m not alone: there are channels not only in my brain but on your television dedicated to Trump hate porn. To watch them is to take the bait. Christopher Sorrentino once connected Trump to Bakhtin’s concept of “the Carnival”: he “serves the purpose of those who, in medieval Carnivals, pretended to be the local noble, or the local Bishop; the hero as coward, the statesman as belligerent.” Picturing this man again staffing up the machine of state and legislating material pain on human beings is a nightmare, of course.
It has become common to understand the current Republican Party as the full optimization of Nixon’s “southern strategy.” In this story, Nixon’s dog whistles, then Reagan’s, were preparing us for rougher handling, for the discarding of all “compassionate” disguises, and for the degradation of our discourse into open hate speech and paranoid myths. This is also a story of how neoliberal centrism set up the theater of outrage that it then marketed to itself, ever since Obama backlash turned out to be a growth stock. Trump Says the Quiet Part Out Loud. HE SAYS THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD! Incant it loudly and regularly enough and you won’t have to hear yourself think.
Yet what if Nixon’s real triumph wasn’t the production of Trump’s presidency? What if instead it was the seeming permanent necessity of a neoliberal technocratic bulwark against the dispossessed, vengeful, and, yes, in many cases undeniably racist hordes—an Overton window that slides in only one direction? By this logic we find ourselves in a world where Kamala Harris is endorsed by none other than Dick Cheney, the personal conveyor of Nixon’s global dream into the twenty-first century (or, as my Instagram feed grimly joked, “the ghost of Henry Kissinger endorses Kamala Harris”). When asked to explain the title of Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs said, “A frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”
Perhaps the question should be: What would it sound like if the Democratic elite said the quiet part out loud? A portion might sound rather Trumpian: “We’re the only thing between you and those who scare you shitless.” Elsewhere, it might locate its own distinctive grievances: “I can’t believe we handed over and privatized so much for so long and you still call us Commies.” Or: “How dare Silicon Valley play footsie with Trump when we made them (and they made us) so ungodly wealthy?”
Listen. Obama’s cosmopolitan “relatability” made me feel much better about myself and my record collection, despite my total reservations about so many of his actual policies: the refusal to confront, let alone jail, Wall Street; the smooth continuity with and expansion of Bush’s secret security powers; the drone wars; the persecution of whistleblowers et al. I have, in weaker moments, enjoyed a Kamala Harris arched eyebrow or Tim Walz dad meme. (Old Biden was, by contrast, a drag, man.) But truly, how you or I feel when gazing on the current steward of the status quo isn’t the point here. Yes: Trump needs defeating. And: everything must change. Can you hold the two ideas in mind at once?
And, still, none of this is to have spoken of Palestine.
How can it be so painful simply to say what I think? Perhaps because it is so painful to switch, as I must each day in order to teach and write, in order to reply to flattering invitations in e-mails, from the facts breaking across the screen of my awareness. Which news did you switch from, in order to commence your work, this particular morning? (Any recent morning will suffice in this example.) The truth shears through in shrieks and howls; we turn down the volume in order to conduct our daily lives—that is, to do as other human beings alive today will never be allowed. Were I to speak of Palestine and our collective complicity in the slaughter there, it should probably not be in something called an “election symposium,” since, with all due respect, to do so feels a bit like stepping over dead bodies to get to the betting counter at Aqueduct.
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